Cosmopolitan Media Usage in the Diffusion of International Affairs News

Exposure to certain MM is examined as it is related to the diffusion of internat'l affairs information, educ & org'al membership. These factors are examined within a conceptual model in which media exposure is conceptualized as an intervening variable between SE antecedents & consequent effects. Cosmopolitan media were defined as news magazines & metropolitan newspapers. Network TV newscasts were not included because their viewing was not found to be signif'ly related to receiving either news magazines or metropolitan newspapers. The following hyp's were tested & confirmed: (1) cosmopolitan media usage is associated with general knowledge of internat'l affairs; (2) amount of educ & membership in org's are associated with both cosmopolitan media usage & knowledge of internat'l affairs; & (3) general internat'l affairs knowledge is associated with awareness of specific internat'l news events. The data were obtained by telephone interviews from a randomly selected sample of 273 adults in Madison, Wise. The interviews were conducted in Apr 1967 following 2 internat'l news stories which broke in the MM on preceding days. To measure knowledge of internat'l affairs, R's were given the last names of 7 nat'l leaders who had been in the news recently & asked with which country each was associated. Contingency analysis showed a signif relationship between cosmopolitan media usage & the index of internat'l affairs knowledge. The Pearsonian r between the indices of cosmopolitan media usage & knowledge of internat'l affairs was signif even after the effects of educ were partialed out. Educ was signif'ly r'ed with both cosmopolitan media usage & knowledge of internat'l affairs. The N of org's to which R's belonged was signif'ly r'ed with knowledge of internat'l affairs after the effects of educ & cosmopolitan media usage were partialed out. The results indicate that cosmopolitan media usage plays a signif role in the diffusion of internat'l affairs information, but such media behavior does not necessarily have a simple cause-effect relationship with general or specific knowledge. Modified AA.